Construction of Rate-Compatible （RC） Low-Density Parity-Check （LDPC） Convolutional Codes Based on RC-LDPC Block Codes

In this paper, a family of rate-compatible （RC） low-density parity-check （LDPC） convolutional codes can be obtained from RC-LDPC block codes by graph extension method. The resulted RC-LDPC convolutional codes, which are derived by permuting the matrices of the corresponding RC-LDPC block codes, are systematic and have maximum encoding memory. Simulation results show that the proposed RC-LDPC convolutional codes with belief propagation （BP） decoding collectively offer a steady improvement on performance compared with the block counterparts over the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channels （BI-AWGNCs）.